Claudio Campagnari

Biography

Campagnari received a BS in Physics (First Class Honours) from the University of Sussex (Brighton, UK) in 1982 and a PhD in Physics from Yale University in 1988. His thesis research was on a search for lepton flavor violation decays of K-mesons at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He then joined the CDF collaboration at Fermilab, first as a postdoc at the University of Chicago and then as a Wilson Fellow at Fermilab. At CDF Campagnari conceived and led one of the data analyses that culminated in the discovery of the top quark in 1994-95, and was the co-coordinator of all CDF's top searches in 1992-93. He joined the UCSB faculty as an Assistant Professor in 1994. At UCSB he worked on the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center studying CP violation in B-meson decays and since 2003 on the CMS experiment at CERN. In both BaBar and CMS Campagnari contributed to the development and construction of silicon trackers, and was for a time co-system manager of the Babar vertex detector. In CMS Campagnari led at different times the Top and SuperSymmetry analysis teams. His group contributed directly to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 through the study of the WW channel. He also led many CMS searches for new physics that have now severely constrained the viability of the most popular theories of Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) physics. Campagnari is the recipient of a Sloan Fellowship and an Outstanding Junior Investigator award from the Department of Energy. From 2018 to 2023 he served as Chair of the UCSB Physics Department.

Research

In essence particle physics is the study of the properties of the building blocks of matter and their fundamental interactions. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is the primary tool to explore this physics at the highest energies or, equivalently, the shortest distances.

Since 2010 our group has been involved in direct searches for new physics processes with the CMS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Within CMS, our focus here is now shifting towards searches for more exotic signatures, eg, searches for relatively long-lived new particles. We are also involved in a new small scale LHC dedicated experiment (MilliQan) to search for particles with very small electric charge, as low as one thousandth of the charge of the electron. The existence of these "milli-charged" particles is predicted in some dark matter scenarios. As the size of the CMS data sets continues to increase, precision tests of the Standard Model is becoming an area of emphasis in our group. These tests include measurements of rare decays of the top quarks and properties of the Higgs boson. Perhaps the most important future goal is to gain information on the self-interaction of the Higgs boson by measuring and studying the production of two Higgses in the same proton-proton interaction.

In CMS we are also working on the upgrade of some of the electronics for the CMS muon detector, and the group continues to contribute to the maintenance and operation of this detector at CERN. On a completely different front, I have recently also become involved in applying some of the Machine Learning experience from our physics program to clinical medical applications.